Tag Archives: Cancer

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In the class I teach on illness narratives, cancer comes after the plague. In the realm of representation and cultural memory, infectious diseases have a long visual and allegorical pedigree. Pestilence is always already more than an epidemiological reality. With cancer culture things are different. A cursory search for early modern images of cancer in the U.S. National Library of …

After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988, Sharon Batt became of the one the most prominent figures of the grassroots breast cancer movement that flourished in North America during the 1990s. A committed journalist and editor working mainly for feminist …

Recently, a numberofnewsoutletsreported the results of a new research study on the correlation between hormonal contraceptives and breast cancer. The study analyzed data from several Danish national health registers, following 1.8 million women between 15 and 49 years of age. Previous studies of breast-cancer risk among women who use hormonal contraceptives reported inconsistent findings – from …

In the Stanford Hospital car park, there is a sign that reads “WARNING: This garage contains gasoline and diesel engine exhaust which is known to the State of California to cause cancer and/or reproductive toxicity.” The paradox is deadly – one runs the risk of developing cancer on their way to cancer treatment. The sign blatantly highlights the starting point …

Julie Livingston’s Improvising Medicine is a lucid, poignant, and devastating book about the stakes of a growing cancer epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa that is trailing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This ethnography takes place mainly on the recently established oncology ward of Princess …

Writing in The Lancet, Richard Horton called historians of medicine “invisible, inaudible, and … inconsequential”. Historian of medicine Carsten Timmermann responds. This piece is being simultaneously cross-posted at The H Word, a history of science blog hosted by The Guardian.